Tuesday, December 11, 2007

UK Pulls Out Of The ILC

The ILC, which will collide beams of electrons and positrons, is being planned as the next accelerator following the Large Hadron Collider, which is set to come online at CERN in 2008. The UK has played a significant role in building the LHC and the withdrawal will come as a blow for the particle-physics community.

The US, via the Dept. of Energy, has already indicated that no decision on the building of the ILC will be made before 2020 (or even later), prompting Fermilab to come up with an interim Project X. With the withdrawl of the UK, would the US (or maybe Japan) be next to pull out? Any one of these countries pulling out will signal the death of the ILC, I would think.